All-Age WorshipLucy Moore |
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I fear I wrote this book out of passion rather than
out of emotion recollected in tranquillity. There were times when the keyboard
smoked, the dog cringed and the telephone lines to my colleagues smouldered. All-Age Worship bubbled up out of hope and vision
and frustration and exasperation with our limitations as I tried to get down on
paper exactly what we're fumbling our way towards in Barnabas: something about
how wholesome, counter-cultural and plain brilliant church can be when we take
seriously what Paul wrote about the body of Christ not being a body at all if
it's only made up of one part. 'You need all sorts of parts to make a body' he
wrote in 1 Corinthians 12, and that truth has been growing in front of my eyes
as I've hopped along the Messy Church journey, with its congregations of
great-grandparents, middle-aged people, young parents, teenagers, children and
babies all getting stuck into worship together. The vision of an all-age church really isn't a convenient
picture to contemplate. Just as it's easier to build a concrete tower block of
flats than a unique designer house for each customer, so it's much easier to be
church for people who all like pretty much the same sort of thing, who are
physically and mentally in much the same state or who have been Christians for
about the same length of time, than it is to provide for a whole range of ages,
preferences and abilities. It's easier to put on a time of worship for a group
of children in Year Five, or a service for those in their 80s, than to take a
deep breath and say, 'But can we really be church if we 're all much of a
muchness?' Do our church services - the aspect of church life that I look at in
this book - help us celebrate being the body of Christ or do they stop certain
members of our family from fully participating in it? I suppose the most obvious practical frustration for
me in my own situation is Sunday school. The children enjoy it, the parents
love a peaceful service without the fidgeting children to worry about, but why
on earth do we send the children out of the main worshipping body of the church
to be 'taught' separately, then wonder why, at the age of 14 or so, having
outgrown Sunday school, they refuse to come back into the service? Sunday schools
weren't originally set up as a babysitting service for church families or as a
separate children's church, but that's what many have become: why not find a
way to worship God together instead?
Answer: surely not, because we adults like services designed for us alone
without the distraction of so-called 'inappropriate behaviour'? So I found myself writing in every chapter
variations on the theme of: 'This all-age stuff is difficult, it will upset
people, it needs thinking through, it's not for everyone, it's not to be taken
lightly: it's hard!' I also found
myself having to think through assumptions I've grown up with about what church
is, what it's for and why people come to church at all. All-Age Worship is an easy read in some ways:
it's got happy stories in as well as a little spleen-venting, and anything with
children in has to have a fair share of light-heartedness, so there's plenty to
laugh with me about. But it's also a hard read, just as it was a hard write -
just how would God like his Church to be, and how do we interpret that in the
different situations in which we find ourselves? All-age is just the tip of the
iceberg after all: what about all-intelligences, all-spiritualities,
all-stages-of-fitness, all-learning preferences...? What sort of a body is your
church? To
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